Jenny Han and Sofia Alvarez have never met in person. In fact, prior to this interview, the author and screenwriter behind Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before (available for streaming August 17) had never even spoken. Even so, they’ve managed to bring a tender, lighthearted romance to life—starring a perfectly average teenager who doesn’t need a makeover to grow or change by the end of her story.

Directed by Susan Johnson, the film is charming across the board—but it’s the story at its center, written by Han and adapted for the screen by Alvarez, that makes it stand out. Based on Han’s best-selling Y.A. novel, To All the Boys follows high-school junior Lara Jean Song Covey (Lana Condor), after her hatbox of love letters—one for each of the five boys she’s loved in her life—mysteriously goes missing. Our protagonist, who would much rather fantasize about love than actually fall into it, is suddenly forced to face her feelings head-on, navigating potential suitors including her middle-school crush, Peter Kavinsky (Noah Centineo), and her older sister’s ex-boyfriend, Josh Sanderson (Israel Broussard), while simultaneously dealing with all the other stressors that come with being a teenager.

“When I wrote the book, I went into it hoping to write a modern, classic love story that felt really warm and cozy,” said Han. Hers is a story about a young girl who is comfortable being the sidekick in her own narrative, before suddenly finding herself to be the heroine: “I wrote [Lara Jean] for the girls who aren’t quite ready for the next steps.”

Alvarez made sure to honor that conception in her adaptation, using voice-over and internal monologue to get us into the head of a girl who, well, lives too much in her head. “I was thinking about my own high-school experience a lot,” the screenwriter said. “Particularly being in early high school and younger, and the idea that you want these sort of [romantic] relationships and love, and [how they feel] so comfortable in your head, but then can feel so uncomfortable in real life.”

The result is a movie that’s relatable without feeling clichéd, and hopeful without being unrealistic. This is in large part thanks to Lara Jean, who’s sweet and fanciful and unassuming, the kind of girl who’d rather stay at home and bake cupcakes, or watch The Golden Girls with her little sister, Kitty (Anna Cathcart), than go out to parties. She isn’t the most popular girl, but she isn’t an outcast, either. She just prefers to keep to herself—until, of course, she’s forced not to. When Peter first confronts her about his letter, she literally faints on the spot.

“I’m a huge fan of rom-coms, and it’s made me so sad that we’ve had this little dearth of [them] for the past 15 years or so,” Han said. “I love them because I like to feel hopeful at the end of a story.”

The film is the latest entry in Netflix’s recent push to revive the genre—though even now, it’s still radical to see an Asian-American character front and center. Prior to this summer, even seeing an Asian-American as an object of desire (in a non-fetishizing way) was practically unheard of. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, however, features a young Asian-American protagonist without centering the story on her race. Lara Jean and her two sisters are half Korean and half white, yet even though their ethnic/racial identity is a large part of their lives, it isn’t the only thing that defines them.

“I always think about race as a part of one’s identity, not the whole of one’s identity,” Han said. “You don’t want it to be the defining characteristic of a character. There has to be more.”

This isn’t to say the story ignores race and ethnicity altogether: the backdrop of the film (and book) features the Song sisters’ widowed father making conscious efforts to keep his daughters connected to their deceased mother’s culture. But these moments are treated with normalcy, rather than through a lens of exoticism: when their father messes up a Korean dish, the girls—clearly used to his poor attempts at Korean cuisine—roll their eyes and eat it anyway, so as not to hurt his feelings. As a result, the Song girls are allowed to just be normal teenagers, dealing with normal teenager things—which is something Han had to fight for.

“Early on, when there was interest in the movie, people didn’t really understand why I was insisting that the actress [playing Lara Jean] be Asian-American,” Han says. “It was confusing to people. There’s nothing in the story that requires her to be Asian. I found myself in the position of having to justify that choice.”

Her experience wasn’t unusual: when Kevin Kwan was shopping around Crazy Rich Asians, another book-turned romantic comedy, he was also faced with producers who wanted to make the protagonist a white woman. But like Kwan, Han was persistent, and waited until she found the right producing partners to bring her vision to life. “I really wanted to do a love story that shows that there’s a lot of different ways to be an American girl,” she said—one that proves Asian-Americans are just as worthy of love stories and happily-ever-afters as anyone else.

Neither Alvarez nor Han takes that lightly: “There was this idea [in the film industry] that the female perspective is just one perspective, when, actually, there are just as many different women’s stories as there are different men’s stories,” Alvarez said. “You can relate to someone in many different ways, and you learn if you’re not always the person being represented. [It’s important to be able to say,] ‘I see myself in this person, even if they don’t look like me or have the exact same background that I do.’”

Normalizing a diversity of identities feels all the more significant in a movie like this one that belongs to a genre that’s historically been overwhelmingly white. To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before is a refreshingly joyful story—and one that makes sure to deliver the requisite rom-com ending.

“Comedy in the past 15 years or so has gone really far in the cynical realm, and the ironic realm, and a rom-com just doesn’t work if it’s cynical,” Alvarez said. “You need to feel that warmth at the end of it. There has to be sincerity for a rom-com to work.” Perhaps now more than ever, the world is desperate for this kind of life raft—a need both Han and Alvarez are happy to oblige.

“Our news is so heavy, I don’t really have room in my heart for a lot of cynicism and negativity in my entertainment,” Alvarez said. “I want to see a 16-year-old girl falling in love, and I want to experience warm rom-coms. It’s a nice form of escapism that I think we’ve been missing for a while—and maybe we were missing it because we didn’t need it, and now we need it again.”